I Made It The Mantra Of Those Days; When I Paused Before Yet Another Series Of Switchbacks Or Skidded

It required me to suffer. It compelled me to reach.

Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

Don't lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don't have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue.

Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

I was reading about animals a while back and there was this motherfucking scientist in France back in the thirties or forties or whenever the motherfuck it was and he was trying to get apes to draw these pictures, to make art pictures like the kinds of pictures in serious motherfucking paintings that you see in museums and shit. So the scientist keeps showing the apes these paintings and giving them charcoal pencils to draw with and then one day one of the apes finally draws something but it's not the art pictures that it draws. What it draws is the bars of its own motherfucking cage. Its own motherfucking cage!

Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

…go to a bookstore and buy ten books of poetry and read them each five times. Because the truth is inside.

Cheryl Strayed  (when asked to give one piece of advice to people in their twenties)

I suppose this is what I meant when I wrote what I did, sweet pea, about how it is we cannot possibly know what will manifest in our lives. We live and have experiences and leave people we love and get left by them. People we thought would be with us forever aren't and people we didn't know would come into our lives do. Our work here is to keep faith with that, to put it in a box and wait. To trust that someday we will know what it means, so that when the ordinary miraculous is revealed to us we will be there, standing before the baby girl in the pretty dress, grateful for the smallest things.

Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

You don’t have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt… You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you’re holding...

Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

You don't have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don't have to explain what you plan to do with your life. You don't have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don't have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history or economics or science or the arts. You have to pay your electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that's all.

Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear

Be fearless enough to let love transform you.

Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

The unifying theme is resilience and faith. The unifying theme is being a warrior and a motherfucker. It is not fragility. It's strength. It's nerve.

Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

There are some things you can't understand yet. Your life will be a great and continuous unfolding.

Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar